Hey loves,
Several of you were interested in my archaeology work in Poland from when I was in college. It is still one of my very favorite adventures! I don’t have a career even remotely focusing on archaeology, but it has always been something that I have been interested in.
When I was in college, all of my friends were going to do medical work (I had a lot of premed friends) in Brazil and Guatamala and I had another friend going to South Africa and, honestly, I was jealous and decided that if everyone else was going somewhere, I was too! I love all things medieval so I googled medieval archaeology and found myself on the Slavia Project homepage signing up for field school.
I worked all summer to pay for it, got my passport, and flew around the world myself to Poland to dig up skeletons! It was an amazing trip and I learned a lot about medieval Poland and Polish culture. It’s still one of my very favorite countries!
I spent two weeks learning to excavate skeletons, draw skeletons, how to sift dirt for charcoal and create profiles of the site we were digging. I can’t put my finger on my photos right now, but luckily the website still had one up for from my time there! The skeleton that us pretty center and has a lump of dirt beside it is Betty (a name we gave her… she actually has buck teeth and we called her bucktooth Betty). The pile of dirt beside her is an infant. She most likely died in childbirth. This was not her first child though, because evidence on her hip bones shows she had two others. I did a lot of work with Betty and got to draw her in the site profile.
This site in Poland is in a tiny town called Giecz (it rhymes with “fetch”). They have found some amazing things here… including a royal sword and a vampire burial (not while I was there… that would have been amazing!). I did get to see and handle some bones of a person who had leprosy and learned all about how to identify that disease in bones though!
The people were all amazing and so patient with an education major who probably had no business trying to learn to be an archaeologist in two weeks over the summer! It was amazing to see what all people could learn from a skeleton and to see the respect that these scientist had for these ancient individuals.
The site has come a long way since I was there in 2002. They have written many, many papers on what they have learned and have even been featured on a Discovery Channel show (I have never been able to find it because it was on Discovery International).
I’m including the website in case anyone would like to read more or see what a typical day in the life of a field student is… or maybe you have a wild bone for adventure and fancy a trip yourself… (10/10 recommend!). One day I am going back! Just goes to show you that when you get a wild hair to do something… you never quite know where you’ll end up!
This is amazing.
I keep meaning to watch a YouTube video or read a book about it and learn more- understanding more about how our bodies function could only be beneficial wisdom, I think!
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